Hey Jimmy:
Ain’t you heard?
RACE and ART
Are far apart.
—postcard from Langston Hughes to James Baldwin, 1962

By the time of his death in 1987 James Baldwin had long since become that most tragic of literary figures: a major writer on the skids whose last few published books, painful in their lack of distinction, served only to remind discriminating readers of how far he had plummeted since his glory days. And glory days they had truly been: in the late Fifties and early Sixties he was not only one of America’s most critically acclaimed authors, but, in the words of James Campbell—who has now published the first full biography of Baldwin—“practically the most famous writer in the land.”¹In later years, however, he spent less time writing, it seemed, than sitting in Paris cafés, giving interviews in which he spun out fraudulent, self-flattering versions of his personal history as well as glibly radical pronouncements upon American society and race relations. Indeed, as Campbell notes, Baldwin’s genre of choice during his later years was not the novel, play, poem, essay, or short story—at all of which he had tried his hand—but the interview; and the more absurdly extremist his remarks, the more sorrowfully aware his sometime admirers were of how much distance he had placed not only between himself and the literary interests of his youth, but between himself and the philosophy of race that he had communicated so eloquently in much